Streamline legal processes and speed up document turnaround time with signNow

In 2020, the Legal industry accelerated the adoption of digital practices to face the challenges of the new reality. Research indicates that 85% of law firms have been forced to introduce digital tools firm wide to be able to handle their legal processes since the beginning of the pandemic. Some of the transformations that the legal industry had to embrace included widespread remote work, transition to cloud computing, video conferencing deployment, electronic signatures, and digitally managed contracts.

The use of technology in the legal industry increased immensely, especially between March and July 2020. According to Bloomberg Law, the use of billing, timekeeping, and collaboration tools has skyrocketed within in-house legal departments compared to big law firms. At that, legal departments and firms of all sizes faced the need to keep contracts and documents moving forward — even while remote.

The early adopters of digital technology managed to navigate through the crisis successfully. According to a McKinsey survey, 72% of the enterprises that were first in their industries to experiment with new technologies reported that their COVID-19 responses had been very effective, as opposed to 33% of later adopters. 

More and more legal professionals choose to embark on a digital transformation journey with a secure eSignature solution. With signNow for Legal, you can easily speed up legal document processes, reduce risks, boost staff productivity, and delight your clients with an easy-to-use solution and consistent signing experience in-office and remotely.

Drive productivity, empower team collaboration, and serve more clients

The 2019 Orion Workflow Survey determined the biggest workflow challenges in the legal industry. 36% of lawyers named the bottlenecks causing delays in their work operations their most problematic issue, while another 22% were challenged with the need to engage in manual or redundant processes. 

signNow empowers legal professionals with robust features to make routine paper processes fast and secure. Whether it’s collaborating on agreements, reusing standard contracts as templates, sharing documents and templates across teams, or sending contracts for signature, all of it can be done with signNow. 

Here’s how signNow helps legal professionals drive productivity and facilitate team collaboration:

1. signNow’s intuitive interface allows for fast deployment and adoption across teams and organizations. Create teams to share your documents faster and collaborate on them with colleagues, clients, and/or stakeholders. Track every modification made in a document using Document History. Use fillable fields and automated signing guidance to collect all the required data. Once finished, send the document to signers for data collection, signatures, and/or payment.
2. Instant and secure synchronization between desktop and mobile applications. With signNow, legal teams can enjoy mobile-friendly signature workflows. Any offline changes made to a document from the mobile application will automatically synchronize as soon as an internet connection is restored. Accelerate contract execution by editing, sending, and eSigning from anywhere, anytime, and from any device. 
3. Maximized efficiency with 200+ pre-built integrations. Sign, send, and track documents without logging out of the productivity tools you already use and love. signNow integrations are available for multiple CRMs, ERPs, cloud storage services, and other collaboration tools. Simplify signing and document management processes with e-signature and automated cloud storage without leaving the apps you already have in place. 

Research suggests the use of e-signatures decreases document turnaround time by 80% while delivering an 80% improvement in productivity on average. signNow has proven to boost team productivity, saving teams 22,000 hours annually. Using signNow, legal professionals can get documents signed in under 30 seconds from their customers, partners, and/or employees. 

Increase customer satisfaction and reduce document errors

signNow provides clients with an intuitive interface and consistent signing experience on any device, even while offline. Here’s how signNow helps to increase customer satisfaction and reduce errors in legal documents:  

• Collect accurate documents using fillable fields. With signNow, you can create a document with a variety of fillable field types (text, date, drop down, signature, initials, phone number, and more). Set these fields as required or optional to ensure the requested data and signatures are collected accurately. 
• Use automated signing guidance to prevent signers from missing important fields. This helps even inexperienced signers to effortlessly work through a document from their desktop or mobile device without missing a single requested field or signature.
• Create signing roles and signing orders for documents completed by multiple signers. Set a signing order to ensure a document is completed in the correct order. Assign specific fields to specific roles, and accelerate signature cycles with automatic routing. 
• Allow signers to access and sign documents on any device, from anywhere, anytime. Signers can choose to type to sign, draw to sign, or upload an image of their signature to attach their legally-binding e-signatures to a document. Better yet, to access and fill out documents, signers are not even required to have a signNow account at all. 
• Get your documents completed on time. Within signNow, you can set-up signing reminders to ensure recipients meet your signing deadlines. signNow makes it possible to collect signatures 24x times faster and decrease document turnaround times from 6-14 days to just minutes.

Watch the video below to see how Legal professionals can accelerate document completion with signNow:

Keep your data safe and maintain industry-leading compliance

The 2020 ILTA Technology Survey revealed that small and medium-sized law firms named security compliance, phishing, and social engineering threats their top concerns. Meanwhile, larger law firms with over 700 employees put more emphasis on productivity issues, information governance, and managing project loads. With multiple legal documents scattered across applications, devices, cloud platforms, and corporate emails, ensuring information security has never been so important.  

signNow understands that protecting data and adhering to compliance is pivotal for legal professionals:

• All signatures added with signNow are legally-binding under the ESIGN Act and EIDAS. signNow fully complies with industry-leading security standards, such as HIPAA, FERPA, SOC 2 Type II, 21 CFR Part 11, GDPR, and PCI DSS. 

• signNow’s court-admissible Audit Trail allows you to keep track of every modification and signing event for each document. View timestamps and IP addresses attributed to every action performed in the lifetime of the document.

• Password protection, 256-bit encryption, and standard compliance present an extra level of security to ensure your information is safe. signNow also helps legal professionals to differentiate themselves inside the industry by implementing multi-factor authentication via phone call or SMS to further protect their documents and their client data.

Go paperless and optimize paper supply and postage costs

Research indicates that organizations spend approximately 1-3% of their annual revenue on printing. On top of that fact, 90% of North American companies are unaware of their actual expenditure. With signNow, companies can save up to $30 per document by eliminating the need to print, scan, and mail. 

Physical paperwork is becoming obsolete for a number of reasons:

1. Activities typically associated with handling physical paperwork are burdensome, time-consuming, and often result in missed fields and signatures. This causes costly delays, especially if signatures are required from multiple signers.
2. Due to the pandemic, in-person signatures on paper contracts can pose a potential health threat. Not offering an opportunity to complete documents remotely means contracts cannot be properly executed, making it impossible for businesses to move forward.
3. Paper-based processes present data security and management risks. Protecting confidential information on paper documents is extremely challenging. With signNow’s features like password protection, multi-factor authentication, 256-bit encryption, a court-admissible Audit Trail, and automated cloud storage, security risks are minimized and data is kept compliant.

signNow for Legal: industry use cases

Digital lending and loan agreements

Maintaining the continuity of business from afar is one of the main challenges facing digital lending providers today. When used in conjunction with digital lending platforms, signNow is capable of offering an intuitive signing experience for loan agreements and digital lending contracts. By using signNow, digital lenders can reduce signature cycles from days to minutes, increase customer satisfaction, and safeguard sensitive data. 

Power of Attorney

Signing a power of attorney turns out to be a burdensome process for both legal professionals and their clients. Sending out Power of Attorney forms results in spending excess time and money on printing and sending mail. With signNow, law firms can maximize their billable hours, minimize document errors, reduce paper and postage costs, and ensure secure document retention. 

Non-Disclosure Agreements

Non-disclosure agreements are commonplace in many business settings and are often used to protect confidential information. With signNow’s reusable templates and a secure document workflow, sending an NDA over for signature is possible while you’re still on the call. signNow allows legal departments to execute NDAs in real time, increase transparency, leverage unlimited cloud storage, maintain data security and confidentiality. 

In conclusion

The need for accelerated digital adoption is one of the main challenges facing the legal industry during the pandemic. With signNow, not only can law firms and legal departments of all sizes improve signature workflows and team productivity, but they can also drive collaboration and securely manage legal records from anywhere, anytime. 

Here’s how in-office and remote legal teams can benefit from using signNow for Legal: 

• Automate signature cycles with fillable fields and role-based signing orders for multiple signers
• Maintain continuity of business processes with the ability to edit, send, and sign documents even while offline; send and sign documents anywhere, anytime
• Delight employees and customers with an intuitive user interface, automated signing guidance, and a consistent signing experience
• Reduce risks while keeping data secure with 256-bit encryption and industry-leading compliance
• Reduce expenses by eliminating the need to print, scan, fax, or mail paper documents

Originally published in March 2021, updated in May 2023 for comprehensiveness and accuracy